At this time I began to detect the rise of that adventurer-class at which history points a punctual finger after every great war but which I somehow did not expect to see in my own time. When I was called back to London, I found new men in Fleet Street and the City, new names at Covent Garden and in the candidates’ books of the clubs; at Cannes I discerned, in the good-looking person of Violet’s brother Laurence, an adventurer in the making. As I became acquainted with his friends in the course of the next three years, I saw the natural, perhaps the necessary, evolution of a type which has not yet found its place in the social void. My cousin had been snatched from Melton on his eighteenth birthday and thrust into the Irish Guards, where his precocious development as a man-of-the-world had been won at the expense of his small aptitude for learning. The Hunter-Oakleighs could not afford to maintain him in idleness; and Laurence, recognizing this, quartered himself on Loring House and allowed Violet or any other of his relations to maintain him. In theory, he was reading for the bar; and a text-book on Roman law was always at hand to rebut the charge of idleness. In practice, he blandly awaited pecuniary compensation from a society which had taught him expensive tastes at a time when he might have been teaching himself the means of gratifying them. The army had paralysed his initiative; he believed—or affected to believe—that, at one-and-twenty, his life-work was done; and already he had learned that personal charm and rich friends were a fair substitute for industry. “I wish you’d advise me about Laurie,” said Violet one day, with a troubled glance down the verandah to the bed of down cushions where her brother was devoting to _La Vie Parisienne_ the hours demanded by the institutes of Justinian. “He’s rather a problem.” “The whole of his generation is a problem,” I said. “He stands between Jim, who’s dead, and Sandy, who’s still a child. He and his like have already borne the burden of the war; now he’ll have to bear the burden of clearing up after the war.” My proposal found less than no favour in the hearing to which it was directed. “I’m not bearing any more burdens till I’ve made myself secure,” Laurence declared. “Nor’s any one else. Half the men I know have come back to see another fellow doing their job; the other half are like me and never had a job to come back to. And, while we were away, you let a pack of women into all the professions,” he grumbled. “Laurie will marry a rich wife,” Sam Dainton prophesied. “I’d do the same myself, only I’m so precious ugly.” “That doesn’t matter when men are scarce,” said Laurence reassuringly; “but I’d much prefer it if _you_ married the rich wife and let me blow in as the _tertium quid_. That’s the way all the best marriages are arranged nowadays.” “I wonder what the modern girl will turn into,” drawled Philip Hornbeck at a tangent.